Dr KARL SHUKER

Zoologist, media consultant, and science writer, Dr Karl Shuker is also one of the best known cryptozoologists in the world. Author of such seminal works as Mystery Cats of the World (1989), The Lost Ark: New and Rediscovered Animals of the 20th Century (1993; greatly expanded in 2012 as The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals), In Search of Prehistoric Survivors (1995), and more recently Extraordinary Animals Revisited (2007), Dr Shuker's Casebook (2008), Karl Shuker's Alien Zoo: From the Pages of Fortean Times (2010), Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery (2012), and Mirabilis: A Carnival of Cryptozoology and Unnatural History (2013), his many fans have been badgering him to join the blogosphere for years. The CFZ Blog Network is proud to have finally persuaded him to do so.

"Beneath the earth are older things than perhaps we
understand: as old as the ground in which they live, and part of it. Every so
often, when the time is right, they appear again above the earth to visit the
world that once was theirs alone."

Patricia Wrightson – An Older Kind of Magic

The following ShukerNature article was originally inspired in no small way by the above book, which was a favourite of mine as a youngster.

According to the
traditional beliefs of the native Australian (Aboriginal) peoples, Alcheringa -
the Dreamtime - was the Time of Creation. As described by Mudrooroo Nyoongah in
Aboriginal Mythology (1994), it "symbolizes that all life to the aboriginal
peoples is part of one interconnected system, one vast network of relationships
which came into existence with the stirring of the great eternal archetypes,
the spirit ancestors who emerged during the Dreamtime".

In the
Dreamtime, all of today's Australian animals existed in human form, as
kangaroo-men, emu-men, koala-men, even starfish-men, and so forth, only later
transforming into animals. However, there were also many much stranger beings -
some monstrous, some humanoid or part-humanoid. These are discounted as
fictitious by westerners and are largely unknown outside Australia. However, this
vast continent's indigenous nations firmly believe that they still exist even today,
and can occasionally be seen - if you know where, and how, to look for them...

THE
SHADOW PEOPLE - FROM NYOL TO NINGAUI

According to the
Wiradjuri people of New South Wales's central west,
the elders always tell their children to count their shadows when playing, and
be sure to tell them if they count an extra one - for that will surely mean a
winambuu or a yuuri is playing with them.

Roughly
equivalent to the Little People elsewhere in the world, the winambuu and yuuri (pronounced
‘yawri’) resemble small dwarf-like beings, only 3
ft tall and hairy. They can be benevolent or antagonistic,
depending upon their prevailing mood and the manner in which they are treated
by humans, often acting as tricksters, but serving as guardians of certain
localities too. Also spoken of in New South
Wales, but this time by the Gumbangirr people,
are the bitarr, who derive great pleasure from playing with Gumbangirr
children.

Concealed to all
but the sharpest of native eyes in the eastern Australian state of Victoria as they play
amid the shadows of dusk are the nyols. These small humanoid entities have
stony-grey skin, and spend their daytime underground like Antipodean gnomes,
inhabiting subterranean caverns in deep rocks. According to Kurnai tradition,
they can be good or evil, and will sometimes steal the memory of humans that
they encounter.

The net-nets
also hail from Victoria and inhabit
rocky caverns, but mostly above-ground, and have brown skin with long claws
instead of nails. In some ways the Australian counterpart of leprechauns,
net-nets tend to make nuisances of themselves with humans – stealing things,
and deceiving human hunters. Further details of nyols and net-nets can be found
in Massola Aldo's book Bunjil's Cave (1968) – a fascinating collection
of traditional folklore drawn from Victoria's Aboriginal
nations.

Ask any
zoologist what a ningaui is, and if they are well-informed they will reply that
it is a tiny shrew-like form of Australian marsupial mouse, the first known
species of which were formally documented by science as recently as 1975.

To the native Australian
Tiwi people, conversely, ningauis are much more ancient, familiar entities -
and it is from these that the ningaui marsupial mice derive their name. In
traditional Tiwi Aboriginal lore, the ningauis (‘short ghosts’) comprise a
hairy race of 2-ft-tall Dreamtime beings with short feet and a passion for
eating raw food, as they have no knowledge of how to make fire. They are active
only at night, and inhabit dense mangrove swamps on Melville Island, off Australia's northern
coast. The ningauis assisted in the earliest Kulama ceremonies, which are
initiation rites into religious cults and feature the special preparation for
eating of an otherwise poisonous yam known as the kulama.

Some
investigators claim that there are undiscovered tribes of Aboriginal pygmies
inhabiting remote regions of Australia, such as the Cairns rainforest,
smaller than the short-statured tribes already known to have once existed
there.

Amateur
historian Frank O’Rourke of Bloomfield, Queensland, has been
actively researching reports of pygmies in the Cairns outback for
many years, having amassed records dating back to the times of first European
settlement. He has even unearthed some long-forgotten photographs from the 1880s
depicting extremely small Aboriginal people little more than 3
ft tall, from the Bloomfield region, found among documents housed
in Brisbane’s John Oxley Library.

Moreover, fellow
Queensland investigator Grahame Walsh has long been on the prowl through the
rugged bush terrain around Carnarvon Gorgein search of junjuddis – very small ape-like entities only 3
ft or so tall, with hairy humanoid bodies but long ape-like arms,
and a somewhat odiferous presence. A former Carnarvon National Parks and
Wildlife officer, Walsh has no doubt that these weird mini-beings are real, and
has even encountered their tracks, preserved by him afterwards as plaster casts
– which he likens to the footprints that a 5-year-old child would make. During
the 1970s, there was a spate of junjuddi sightings, but fewer in recent times,
because people rarely traverse the wildernesses nowadays. Similar pygmies are
claimed to exist in the mountains of Arnhem Land north of the RoperRiver in the Northern
Territory, where they are called the burgingin.

In late October
2002, announcing her then-forthcoming Quest Trek 2002 expedition in search of
putative surviving thylacoleonids or marsupial lions in the Flinders Range region of South
Australia, Aussie cryptozoologist Debbie Hynes also
referred to a much less familiar crypto-subject, the Grey People. This is the
name given by Westerners here to a mysterious race of very small, furry,
black-skinned humanoids, which walk upright but are only 3-4.5
ft tall, with sloping brows, pronounced eyebrow ridges, and
ape-like faces. Long spoken of in the local desert Aboriginals’ legends, they
also have their own Aboriginal name, and they appear in ancient rock art, but
are still being reported today too.

According to
Debbie, in 2001 an American back-packer startled one of these beings when he
returned to his camp and discovered it stealing his belongings. Debbie’s own
guide for her expedition was a trapper back in the 1950s and 1960s, who
mentioned to her that on one occasion he’d been followed by some Grey People,
hoping to steal rabbits from his traps, and during that trip he’d found one
sprung trap containing a fresh human-like fingernail but no bigger than the nail
of a young child’s little finger; he assumes that in springing it, a hand of
one such entity had been caught by the trap.

How
extraordinary it would be if the preternatural gnomes and dwarfs of Australia’s Dreamtime
proved to be bona fide (albeit exceedingly elusive) pygmy tribes still evading
formal scientific recognition. After all, certain strange Dreamtime entities,
once deemed entirely fabulous, have since been shown to have been inspired by
erstwhile native species of animal – so perhaps Australia’s s shadowy
Little People may also have an origin in reality instead of reverie.

STICK
MEN AND NIGHT SPIRITS

Stranger in form
than the Aboriginal Little People are the various 'stick beings' of Dreamtime
tradition. They include the desert-dwelling mimi of Arnhem Land in the Northern
Territory. Said to have sported human form before
the coming of the first Aboriginals, these spirit people are nowadays tall but
exceptionally thin, resembling animated sticks, and are thus able to live
inside the narrowest rocky crevasses and amid the densest bush or scrub. Many
ancient but finely-executed rock paintings exist in this region that depict
mimi, portraying them dancing, running, hunting various creatures, and are
usually painted only in red ochre. According to Aboriginal lore, these are the
work of the mimi themselves, i.e. self portraits. Furthermore, it is the mimi
who supposedly taught the first Aboriginal people in northern Australia how to paint,
as well as how to hunt and cook kangaroos and other animals.

Nevertheless,
mimi are not always benevolent, and today they are feared by native people
here, because their diet not only includes yams, of which they are exceedingly
fond, but also any unwary humans that they may choose to seize with their
skeletal hands, especially if provoked. Consequently, when passing through
mimi-frequented territory, it is best to choose a windy day. This is because
these weird-looking entities are frightened to venture forth in such weather,
in case their fragile thread-like necks should be broken by the blustery power
of the wind.

An even more
malevolent race of stick beings are the vampire-like gurumukas, frequenting Groote Eylandt ('GreatIsland') in the Gulf of
Carpentaria. These spindly nocturnal spirits have long projecting teeth,
and if one of them should encounter a native Australian walking alone at night,
it will bite the back of his neck, causing him to die in great pain unless
rescued and swiftly tended to by a medicine man.

Equally malign
are the nadubi of Arnhem Land, which are equipped with barbed stingray-like spines
projecting from their elbows and knees. These bizarre spirit beings also seek
solitary humans, and if they should find one and succeed in stabbing a spine
into his body, he will surely die unless the spine is removed immediately by a
wise shaman.

The largest and most
famous of all spirit stick men, however, are the quinkin, from Queensland's Cape York
Peninsula. These giant entities represent the embodiment of human lust -
on account of their excessively large (and often grotesquely-shaped) male sexual
organs. As with the mimi, there are many prehistoric cave paintings depicting
the quinkin, in Cape York's Laura rock galleries.

NEITHER
MAN NOR BEAST - CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE SPOOKY KIND

The most
frightening monsters in any culture are those that appear partly, but not
entirely, human, and this is certainly true of the Australian Dreamtime beings.

The
yara-ma-yha-who is a truly grotesque spirit entity, which has red hair, red
skin, huge eyes, lives in fig trees, and superficially resembles a small, toothless
old man. However, it is also equipped with some decidedly non-human attributes.
There are suckers on the ends of its long fingers and toes through which it
sucks the blood of any unsuspecting human that it can leap upon. Its incredibly
flexible jaws are not hinged at the back, hence they can open so wide that it
can swallow its human victim whole. And its massive stomach is so obese that it
can readily hold its victim until he is totally digested! Sometimes, however,
it does not digest its victim, but regurgitates him and reswallows him several
times. Each time, its victim becomes smaller, and redder - until at last he has
transformed into a yara-ma-yha-who.

The Aboriginals'
ancestors travelled to Australia from southern Asia, which is home
to several species of small, tree-dwelling, carnivorous/insectivorous primate
known as tarsiers. Although harmless to humans, tarsiers do have enormous eyes
and suckers on the ends of their fingers, and can look very unnerving at times!
Cryptozoologists have speculated that perhaps the yara-ma-yha-who is a
distorted, much-exaggerated folk memory of a tarsier, passed down from the
Australian Aboriginals' Asian ancestors.

Similarly, just
as there are many reports in southern Asia of giant
bat-like entities - referred to in Java, for instance, as the ahool, and in
Seram as the orang bati ('flying man') - native Australian lore also contains
legends of veritable 'bat-men', known as the keen-keeng. Long ago, this tribe
of half-humans inhabited a huge cave on the Western Australian border, and
worshipped a fire god, to whom they sacrificed living humans. In their normal
state, the keen-keeng were outwardly human, which greatly assisted them when
luring victims to their cave, but they could be distinguished by their hands,
which lacked the first two fingers of human hands. Their greatest difference,
however, was their magical aerial ability - for whenever they chose, the
keen-keeng could raise their arms above their heads and instantly transform
them into a pair of large, powerful wings. This talent enabled these eerie
entities to travel great distances when seeking potential sacrifice victims,
but they were finally destroyed by two wise medicine men known as the
Winjarning brothers.

Another
semi-human monster vanquished by the Winjarnings was Cheeroonear, who lived
with his wife and dogs in a dense forest near Nullarbor Plain, which overlaps
the present-day Australian states of South
Australia and Western
Australia. According to William Ramsey Smith's Myths
and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals (1930), Cheeroonear was:

"...a being with ears and face like a dog, but without a chin.
From the lower jaw there hung a flesh-like bag, shaped like the pouch of a
pelican, and leading into the stomach. The ribs did not join in the centre to form
a chest with one cavity, but were arranged so as to make two compartments. The
compartment on the left side contained the lungs, and the one on the right side
held the heart and its vessels, leaving the throat like a wide sack between the
two, so that when it held water or food it looked like a tube...He stood eight
feet high. His arms reached below his knees to his ankles. When he stretched or
opened his fingers he could touch the ground. He could pick up objects from the
ground without stooping."

Responsible for
the disappearance of several people from human camps around the edge of the
forest, Cheeroonear was finally ambushed by the Winjarnings, with the
assistance of a dense fog sent by the God of the Dewdrops, and duly slain with
their warrior boomerangs.

Happily, not all
semi-human Dreamtime entities are dangerous or evil. The potkoorok of Victoria, for instance,
is a shy, inoffensive man-frog, resembling a small human but with a wet
pear-shaped body, long mobile fingers, and huge webbed feet. Highly reclusive,
it actively hides away from human eyes in deep pools and rivers.

Nyol, net-net,
and ningaui, yuuri and yara-ma-yha-who, quinkin, mimi, potkoorok, and many more
too - distant denizens of the Dreaming, but for whom there no longer seems to
be any time in today's 'civilised', westernised world. Yet time is never still,
and one day theirs too may come again.

This ShukerNature article is a greatly-expanded,
updated version of a chapter section from my book Dr Shuker's Casebook: In Pursuit of Marvels and Mysteries(CFZ Press: Bideford, 2008).

SHUKERNATURE SURVIVAL

If you'd like to assist me in my ongoing crypto-investigations, even the smallest donation would be immensely appreciated. All donations are non-profit-making, going exclusively towards the updating/maintenance of my crypto-archives' source material and other necessities that enable me to continue researching and blogging my findings right here for you on ShukerNature. Thank you so much for your help! - Karl

ShukerNature Followers

Subscribe To

Contributors

DISCLAIMER

In Accordance with Title 17 USC Section 107, any copyright material on display here is under Fair Use without any claim of ownership or any profit accrued by the display. The Material herein is for non-profit educational or criticism puposes only. Notwithstanding the provisions of Sections 106 and 106a, the fair use of a copyrighted work including reproduction and distribution of said material as specified in that section, for purposes of education, news reporting, commentary or criticism, scholarship or research, to persons who have expressed a prior interest in receiving such material for such purposes, is NOT an infringement. Also: Unless stated otherwise, all illustrations in ShukerNature blog articles that are credited to a named copyright owner plus Wikipedia have been made available by the copyright owner and Wikipedia for third-person use under the conditions of the Creative Commons Licence. Should any copyright holder of any of the illustrations included on ShukerNature not wish those illustrations to be included here, please contact me and I shall of course remove them.

ATTRIBUTION

All original content on this blog is the exclusive copyright of Dr Karl Shuker, and must NOT be reproduced in any manner without his strict permission in writing.